Self Portrait with Tooth
“A pollution of my love — yes, I was in love with everything.” — Egon Schiele
I.
“Spit out your gum,” I tell my Self,
and he replies: A cud-chewing cow
marched through The Cathedral of St. John
the Divine last Sunday, walked up
to the pulpit, then out the door
onto Amsterdam Avenue. “Keep still,” I say,
and my Self answers: An 84 year old
Brooklyn woman says she and the tree
in her front yard grew up together.
Every autumn morning she eyeballs
her leaf-littered driveway, cursing the heaven
that rests on the treetop. “Smile,”
I say, “I need to see
the gap between your teeth.” My Self returns:
The last conflict in the last
war will be one paparazzo
photographing the ruins, and no one
to develop the pictures.
II.
Egon Schiele,
meet me at the Café Nihilism.
I know a pretty little trollop there.
Every time she greets me, the look
in her eyes turns my stomach,
makes me fling my money at her
and flee to the Ringstrasse,
where the stuccowork on the walls
of the museum, of the theatre,
and of the Votive Church is comfortably
faux. But that same look
in her eyes keeps drawing me back,
the way your Self Portrait with Tooth
beckons even as it frightens.
In Freud’s and Wittgenstein’s Vienna, you
brushed this sunburned grotesquerie of yourself,
brows arched, forehead furrowed, unbuttoned shirt
revealing skin taut over the breastplate,
a single front tooth hanging on
while the mouth forms a capital ‘O’.
At what sight or memory or phantasm
are your large, dark eyes gazing?
At your sister posing nude for you
when you were teenagers?
At your father tossing his stocks
and bonds into the fireplace?
At your professor who said of you:
“The devil shat you into my classroom”?
I want to join you because
you shuddered at all of these,
yet you loved them enough
to turn them into art.
— tom c. hunley